LG 50PZ950

Color Temperature (8.97)

Color temperature varied throughout the spectrum from dark to light, but stayed mostly within the limits of human perception. You probably won’t notice the slight blue tint to pictures in mid range luminance. More on how we test color temperature.

Read Reviews of Comparison Products
Samsung PN59D8000	Panasonic Viera TC-P55VT30	Sony Bravia KDL-55HX820

RGB Curves (7.40)

For top-of-the-line, we were really hoping for better. In fact, we tested the colors three different times, with different calibrations (a process that takes several hours each time), because we have so much faith in LG products, specifically in color performance. Throughout the year, LG televisions have wowed us. Their color accuracy, the use of the entire spectrum, and the smooth transitions rarely matched by other brands. We even tested using the THX Cinema settings, which supposedly go through a host of testing at the factory, to optimize the images for cinema quality. The results were worse than what you see below.

If you compare the beginning of these three graphs with the end, you see the difference between perfect and confoundingly terrible. The three colors start smoothly, sloping in a nice curve, and all colors are in line with each other showing consistency in transition and with the other colors. And then the bumps start, where some values are skipped, or produced incorrectly according to the input signal. Then, the lines begin to separate. Green takes off a little, becoming oversaturated. More bumps, red becomes too shallow, or undersaturated, just before blue explodes into way too bright and maxes out before the brightest possible signal intensity. While blue can get no brighter after a certain point, red and green jumble around, vacillating between too bright and too dim. Red peaks, and then drops before peaking early again. These colors are all over the place.

Similar to the greyscale tests, we put the three colors in gradients on the 50PZ950’s screen. The peaking in the blue was immediately noticeable. Three quarters of the way from darkest to brightest, there was a block of unbreakable blue extending to the brightest end of the gradient. There was banding all over the place, but these bands did not seem to correspond to the correct areas of the gradient. Some bands were very bright, followed by a dim band, followed by another very bright band, when ideally we should have seen a smooth transition from dark to light with no banding at all.

Given that the 50PZ950 is LG’s flagship model for 2011, we are surprised. Color accuracy requires expensive hardware and the best software engineering. Usually we assume that the higher end models make you pay for these extra efforts. This outcome has left us a bit dumbfounded. It’s like we caught our honor roll student smoking meth: the contrast of what is supposed to be and what actually is makes this so confusing that there is nothing to say. We’re not angry, we’re just disappointed. More on how we test RGB curves.

The strips below are visual representations of the RGB curves above. What should be a smooth gradient, showing every value of brightness from darkest to brightest, instead displays quite a bit of banding, where colors block together and jump suddenly to the next value. Also notice that some of these banded lines are brighter than they should be, then get slightly dimmer and then back to bright. This is not right.

Red Response Comparison
Ideal Response
LG 50PZ950
Samsung PN59D8000
Panasonic Viera TC-P55VT30
Sony Bravia KDL-55HX820

Green Response Comparisons
Ideal Response
LG 50PZ950
Samsung PN59D8000
Panasonic Viera TC-P55VT30
Sony Bravia KDL-55HX820

Blue Response Comparisons
Ideal Response
LG 50PZ950
Samsung PN59D8000
Panasonic Viera TC-P55VT30
Sony Bravia KDL-55HX820

Color Gamut (4.03)

Again, the colors left us in despair. Here we see how accurately the colors produced by the 50PZ950 match the international HDTV standard called the Rec. 709. From the results, the match is not very accurate. Specifically, the blues and reds are off, the reds too bright and the blues skewed into the cyan. Greens and the white point were pretty close to the standard however. Look at the numbers in the table to see the exact degree to which these colors err. More on how we test peak color gamut.

The table below contains all the numeric details of the LG 50PZ950’s color gamut performance, compared to the rec. 709 standards.

Rec. 709 versus LG 50PZ950
	u' (rec.709/measured)	v' (rec.709/measured)	Error
Red	0.4507 / 0.4679	0.5229 / 0.4679	0.01724181
Green	0.125 / 0.1334	0.5625 / 0.5633	0.008438009
Blue	0.1754 / 0.165	0.1579 / 0.1841	0.02818865
D65 (White)	0.1978 / 0.1925	0.4683 / 0.4632	0.00735527

Other Models in the Series
For more information on other models in this series, check our Series Comparison Page.
LG 60PZ950 60 in.